


filled this cup with days and shadows

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: F/M, Slice of Life, background Nick/Kira, minor Cassie/OCs, what even is time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-09 22:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20517548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: Cassie hates all these feelings that make her skin feel too tight and her chest ache constantly, and she especially hates that all of them are a thousand times worse when Nick is around.





	filled this cup with days and shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Snacky for looking it over. Title from "There Is No Clear Light" by Pablo Neruda.

Kira meets them on the boardwalk at Coney Island three weeks after she walks off the Division plane where she pushed Carver into killing himself. Cassie nods at her and then gets herself lost so she doesn't have to witness the reunion she's been seeing in her head for a week.

She makes her way to the aquarium, settles down with her sketchpad by the otters, and tries not to feel like she's just lost something she didn't even know she had.

She sees it when Nick realizes she's not there. He grabs Kira again, his fingers tight around her elbows instead of gentle, and he says, "We have to find Cassie."

Kira laughs softly. "Okay, but you know she can take care of herself."

"Better than you can," Cassie mutters, snapping out of it, cranky for no good reason she can articulate. Still, she feels a warm ache in her chest; she won't tell him, not in words anyway, but she only feels safe when he's around.

"I'm okay," she says when they show up at the otter tanks, Nick's quick, frantic look disappearing behind a grin. She steps into the hug he gives her, presses her face to his chest for a breath or two, glad she still gets to have this for now. He's gotten pretty good at hugs in the past couple of weeks.

"Don't do that again," he says, giving her one last one-armed squeeze before letting her go. 

Cassie makes no promises, and she can feel the sharp edges when she grins back at Kira's indulgent smile.

New York is expensive, and full of Division agents, because a reunion at Coney Island might be sweet but it's also obvious, especially for someone Division wants to get its hands on as much as Kira. It puts Nick back on their radar again, and with him, Cassie, and she wants to let him know how angry she is about that, but she can't when he gives her that coaxing face, the one that makes her give in even when every vision in her head is telling her it's a bad idea.

They settle for a while in Atlanta, a dart thrown at a map, and she knows Nick cheated, but she isn't going to argue about it. There's an ex-Division doctor there who can synthesize the drugs Kira needs, and Cassie doesn't like her, but she also doesn't want her dead. Most of the time anyway. 

Cities are safest, as safe as anywhere for people like them, even without the target painted on their backs by Kira's presence. By who—what—they are, if she's honest with herself, but she can't shake the belief that everything would be easier if Kira wasn't there. (She ignores the fact that she's as much a target as Kira, because she might not be a great watcher, but she's leverage for when the drugs stop working on her mother.)

Cassie doesn't like it in Atlanta, the three of them pretending to be a family, which should be what she wants, what she used to wish for right after her mother got taken—Nick the big brother she never knew she wanted, and Kira the big sister she used to long for when her mother would go into a trance for hours at a time—but it's not, for reasons she can't bring herself to name. 

Cassie pretends for a while, though, for their sake. Kira pushes the principal of the nearest high school into letting Cassie attend, her classes full of people whose futures write themselves on the backs of her eyelids when she's tired and loosens her control. She can't get close to any of them because all she can see is the way their lives go wrong: the rape at the frat party, the drunk driving accident on New Year's Eve, the tumors on the X-rays after months of chemo fail.

She fills notebooks with geometry proofs and pictures of her classmates' futures. After she warns more than one girl not to get into a car with the captain of the soccer team, the questions start coming, and they pick up and move. It's a flying road trip, a wild goose chase in which they're the geese—three continents in three weeks and then back to the states, having shaken at least two of their tails.

Cassie doesn't like small towns, either, where it feels like there's no place to hide when everybody's always known everyone else's business. But Nick's still obsessed with her getting an education, so they end up in Santa Fe, which is bigger than a small town and smaller than a big city. Cassie enrolls in another stupid high school, transcripts half-faked and glossed over by the strength and ease of Kira's push, and spends her time struggling with trigonometry and making the acquaintance of the kids who like to drink under the bleachers during their free periods. Nick gets a job working construction and Kira works as a waitress and Cassie wants to claw her own eyes out because all she can see is death, and this isn't getting them any closer to freeing her mother or bringing down Division, and she isn't sure how AP Bio is going to help with that.

She does well in her language classes, aces Spanish and French at school and learns Japanese in her free time. She likes listening to the lessons on her phone while Nick and Kira are being cute at each other. Later, when they've moved four more times and they've stopped being cute and started being angry, she can drown out the sharp conversations that stop when she enters a room, like they really are her parents or something. It makes her laugh, because she's already seen a dozen ways this ends, and none of them are pretty.

They're in San Francisco when Cassie gets the vision of her mother; it's short, and not as clear as her visions usually are, but it's her mother, and she's free. Cassie can't stop sobbing even as she draws—the pages of her notebook are smudged and crinkly from being soaked in tears—and Nick finds her at the tail end of her crying jag. He pulls her into his lap and rubs her back and whispers that everything's going to be okay until she can breathe without sobbing again.

Her eyes are still red but his shirt's dry by the time Kira gets home. She looks at Cassie's drawings and says, "Marseilles," so it's back to France again, though Nick insists Cassie finish the last three weeks of the semester first, because she can't pinpoint a timeline for the vision, just that it's coming.

Her mother's not there, of course, and she's certainly not free, but they meet up with some friends of Pinky's and manage to smuggle a stitch and two other movers out of the city before Division finds them. Cassie figures it's good to have them owe her a favor, and it was time to leave San Francisco anyway. She'd almost made friends there.

The vision of her mother in Marseilles hits again a few weeks later, still brief, but slightly less cloudy. She thinks maybe helping out Pinky's friends will lead to her mother's freedom someday, but she's no closer to knowing _when_ and it makes her want to claw her skin off in rage. She drinks herself sick that night and wakes up on her side on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, Nick hovering over her until Kira shoos him away and shuts the door behind him.

"It's not going to happen right away," Kira says, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.

Cassie looks at her blearily, cheek still pressed to the floor. "It's already been three and a half years."

"I know."

"I just—I can't—" Cassie's head is pounding and her eyes are too sore and dry to cry, but she relaxes a little when Kira gathers her up and hugs her gently.

"She knows you're looking, and that's the important part," Kira murmurs. "When I realized Ni—no one was coming for me, it was hard to keep caring about what was happening. But she helped me, you know." Cassie lifts her head to look at Kira in surprise and Kira nods. "Your mother, yes. She helped me escape. She arranged for us to be here together. And she knows we're looking for her and that one day we'll find her. You just have to keep holding on, Cassie. You have to keep believing, keep making choices, because that's the way you make it happen."

"Okay," she says.

"Baby steps," Kira says, her mouth curving in a rueful smile. "One day at a time."

Cassie can't help laughing. "How many clichés are you packing?" 

"I've got the whole set," Kira says. "Nick gave them to me."

"Re-gifting," Cassie says, tsking and shaking her head. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." But she feels closer to Kira than she ever has before, and better about their situation for the first time in weeks.

Of course, it can't last.

It's a good thing she always keeps a bag packed, ready to go at a moment's notice, because sometimes that's all the warning she gets. 

The next time they land in one place for longer than a few weeks, she meets a boy she likes enough for kissing to turn into dating to turn into his hand between her legs and her mouth on his dick. It's nothing like she expected, but it's okay. It's not great, but it gets better each time, even if she's still not sure she really _likes_ him or if she just likes the way he likes her. If she just likes the way she can pretend he's someone else when she closes her eyes, and her visions open up farther into the future than they ever have before.

She doesn't get a chance to find out. They find out about a Division lab in Saskatoon and blow it up, and then they don't stay in one place for more than thirty-six hours at a stretch for more than a month. They drive halfway across Canada in a beat-up old Chevy that always smells like dirty socks, arguing about where to go next and whose playlist they should listen to. Cassie never finds the source of the smell, though she spends one long Saturday afternoon cleaning the car, and she and Kira both are sick and tired of listening to Nick's dad rock by the time they hit Montreal.

They land in Munich for a while, and Cassie meets a girl named Ingrid, and tries again. Maybe it's a little better, soft curves pressed against her barely padded angles, the sweet taste of strawberry lip gloss, and a language she only half-understands. Maybe German would have been more useful than French, she thinks sleepily, carding her fingers through Ingrid's soft, short hair. They'd spent hardly any time at all in Quebec.

She's jolted out of the soft post-orgasm lassitude by a vision, Division agents heading for their apartment, and she'll never forgive herself if Nick and Kira get taken while she was off getting laid.

She can't explain that to Ingrid, though, so she just throws on her clothes and leaves with a frantic kiss and a goodbye she knows is final even if Ingrid doesn't. She gets there just in time, finds Kira washing dishes while Nick practices his moving.

"Let's go, let's go," she says breathlessly. "They're only about ten minutes out." 

Nick gives her a long once-over and purses his lips, ready to bawl her out, but Kira shakes him off. Cassie's glad at least one of them knows it isn't the time.

She thinks maybe he's forgotten, but once they've settled again, after an endless week of planes, trains and busses that lands them in Lima, he stops her as she's heading out to the market to do some shopping.

"Hey, Cassie, hey. Can we talk?"

"This can't be good," she jokes weakly, trying to ignore the heat of his hand on her arm.

"I feel like you're never around anymore. Maybe you should stick closer to home for a while, huh?" He gives her that coaxing grin, and it still works, even if she's annoyed that he's treating her like she's still thirteen when she's seventeen now and feels like she's forty.

"I thought you wanted to pretend we were normal," she says, because the best defense against him is a good offense. "I thought you wanted me out of the way so you and Kira could, you know." She turns her face away, lets her hair fall between them like a curtain so he can't see that she's not blushing.

"What? No," he says. "I mean, I do wish you could have a normal life, and I wish I could give it to you, but it's not safe. Especially not—" It's his turn to look away, and she bites her lip so she doesn't laugh at how uncomfortable he is talking about sex with her. She should probably be grateful for it, since it means he's never picked up on the way she feels about him. "We can't get close to civilians," he says finally. "It's not safe for us, and it's not safe for them."

"So if I find a nice shifter or bleeder, you'd be okay with that?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. She doesn't mention how bleeders still creep her out.

He hesitates a little too long before he says, "Yeah. Yes, of course. I mean, you're still too young, I mean, you should really talk to Kira." 

Cassie leans in, ignoring the way her heart races when she gets right up into his personal space, and says, "It's okay, Nick. I know how to use a condom."

He chokes and splutters, his face turning red, and she leaves him like that, laughing as she goes. He doesn't need to know they taught it in health class in San Francisco, passed around bananas and condoms and gave serious-faced lectures about STI transmission and unplanned pregnancy, months before she gets hands-on experience of her own.

She sticks close, because he asked, and because they're closer to getting caught than they have been in a long time. She can see Division breathing down their necks every time she closes her eyes, feel it prickling on her skin when she wakes up out of dreams that might as well be visions.

Cassie's the one who calls a family meeting this time, sits down across from them in coffee shop and says, "Listen, they're coming and not just from the Caracas facility. There's a pair of pushers from Berlin headed our way, and a bleeder-burner combo from Singapore." Nick and Kira exchange glances and both of them open their mouths to argue but Cassie just shakes her head. "There's no clever plan to save us this time. We only have a couple of hours before they're here. We have to split up."

"What? Cassie, no." Nick shakes his head, but Kira nods. She knows how relentless Division is and she's the one they want the most.

"I think it's a good idea," Kira says, just like Cassie knew she would. Kira is reliable—pragmatic—in ways Cassie can appreciate. They'll never be sisters the way they've been pretending, but they've become something like friends. It's hard to live on the run with someone you don't care about at all, and Cassie's always cared more than she's wanted to.

They pack up quickly, a benefit to not having much stuff to begin with, and Cassie hugs them both, Kira perfunctorily and Nick for a lot longer than she probably should. She buries her face in his shirt and breathes him in, already seeing a future with him in his determination to keep her safe, and she blinks back the tears before he can see her cry. She hates all these feelings that make her skin feel too tight and her chest ache constantly, and she especially hates that all of them are a thousand times worse when Nick is around, which is always, but she doesn't want to think too much about life when he's not around. She figures she'll have to get used to it soon enough.

Once they're out on the street, Kira heads in one direction and Cassie waits for Nick to go with her, even though she needs to get going herself. She can't help it—she doesn't know when she's going to see him again and he's been everything good in her life for the last three years.

"Come on," he says, grabbing her hand. "We've got a bus to catch."

Cassie looks up at him with wide, startled eyes. "What?"

"Yes," he crows, tossing a little fist pump, clearly pleased with himself. "I love surprising you."

"It's not safe." But she doesn't try to get her hand free, doesn't do anything but let him tug her along to the bus depot, where they get on the first bus scheduled to leave without even looking at the destination.

She remembers the months she was on her own, living hand-to-mouth when she wasn't sleeping on the couch of some friend of her mother's who just happened to appear when she really needed them. She's older now, and more experienced, but it doesn't mean the thought of being on her own again is any less terrifying. She's gotten better with guns, with fighting, but she still doesn't like it, and Nick and Kira have made sure she's never had to be the one to pull the trigger.

And Nick is still taking care of her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders as the steady motion of the bus lulls her to sleep.

They don't see Kira again for a long time.

Things quiet down for a little while, and Nick doesn't make her enroll in school again, but when they get back to the states, she studies for her GED. They celebrate when she passes the test, dinner at the nicest French restaurant in Kalamazoo; for once, Nick doesn't bitch about her drinking and for once, she stops at two drinks. She wants to feel fizzy and light, not see everyone she's ever known die horribly every time she closes her eyes.

"This is nice," he says as they walk back to their motel room. 

She smiles at him, really smiles, warm and genuine and pleased, and bumps his arm with hers. "Yeah."

He reaches between them and takes her hand and she can't suppress the little shiver that runs through her at the touch. Is he being sweet or is he still treating her like a little kid? She can't tell and she doesn't want to ruin the mood by asking.

"Are you cold?" Without giving her a chance to say no, he lets go of her hand, shucks his hoodie, and drapes it over her shoulders. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pretending she doesn't notice how it smells of him as she rolls back the cuffs, and takes his hand again. He lets her.

"Thanks." Her smile feels weird now, goofy and soft in a way it didn't just a minute ago.

His smile is weird, too, when he says, "Any time."

He doesn't know—he _can't_ know—about her stupid infatuation. But maybe he feels something too, beyond the obligation they had to each other when they first met, or even the familial thing he kept trying to make happen. At least he stopped that after Munich. But she's not going to push for more. She doesn't want to lose what she already has.

The next time Cassie gets a warning vision, they're in Edinburgh, chasing a lead from Hook about a Division scientist who wants out and is willing to trade information for help escaping.

"Was it all a setup?" Nick asks when she tells him.

Cassie shakes her head. "I don't know, but they're going to be here in a couple of hours." She bites her lip because she doesn't want to be the one to say it, but she doesn't want him to suggest it either. Somehow, it's better if she says it first. "We should split up."

His immediate, "Cass, no," is heartening, but dumb.

"We're both safer that way." She holds up a hand to stop him from arguing. "You know I'm right."

"Yeah," he says, shoulders slumping. "I know."

They don't have much stuff, so it doesn't take long to pack. 

"Have you seen my blue hoodie?" he asks, yanking open dresser drawers and moving his small pile of clothes into his duffel bag.

"No. Maybe you left it somewhere?"

"I could have sworn I had it," he grumbles, but doesn't argue when she says it's time to go. 

"I have an idea," he says when they're on the way to the airport. She raises an eyebrow and he laughs. "Don't give me that look. You know I'm good at this. Let me protect you even if I can't go with you this time."

"Fine," she says, less grudgingly than she might have if he hadn't tried buttering her up. "Let's hear this genius idea."

"I didn't say genius," he protests, "but I know it'll work." He wrinkles his nose. "We'll have to be the trust fund twins, though. I know how much you hate that."

They have multiple sets of fake papers, and one set is for Rowan and Ryan Betancourt, a pair of rich siblings from New Orleans. Cassie likes the rich part, but she could do without having to pass herself off as Nick's little sister. 

"I can't tell you any more than that, though. Just buy a ticket and meet me at the cab stand."

Cassie smiles falsely at the ticket agent and twirls a lock of hair around her finger as she purchases a ticket to Orlando. Why shouldn't she go to Disney World? It's what Nick would do.

"Okay," he says when he meets her by the taxi drop-off area. "Swap."

"What?"

"Ticket, passport, ID, all of it," he says, shoving an envelope at her and snatching her ticket away as she fumbles for the paperwork in her bag. Once the switch is done, he stands there staring at her for a long moment, and then dips his head and presses a soft kiss to her lips. "Have a good trip, Rowan."

He disappears into the crowd streaming into the airport before she can even process what just happened, her fingers pressed lightly to her lips.

"What the actual fuck," she says to the startled pigeons, and then she opens the envelope and there, with all of Rowan Betancourt's papers, is a first-class ticket to Orlando. She laughs like a drain.

Needless to say, Cassie doesn't go to Disney World.

She pulls Nick's blue hoodie out of her backpack and slips it on, drawing up the hood so she can smell his cologne and hair gel and pretend he's still with her. She takes a shuttle bus to the train station, makes a brief stop in London to make some quick cash, and then heads to Dublin to spend a few weeks with an old friend of her mother's, a shadow Division's never laid a hand on.

Nick's always been good at surprising her, always been hard to see, and she wonders if this time, he surprised himself as well, or if something has been building between them that she was too blinkered to see, too sure it was impossible.

Nothing seems impossible now. She needs to see him again—in person, not in the hazy chiaroscuro of her visions, where he mostly just dies, over and over—as soon as possible. They have ways of reconnecting, contingencies built up over long days of driving from one random point on the map to the next, systems so random and anodyne that hopefully no one else will ever figure them out. The route she chooses isn't the fastest, but it should be the most secure. Big brother may be watching, but the absolute inanity of her message should protect it.

It takes more than a month of seemingly random exchanges on various social media platforms—an image of the Book of Kells and then a map of the constellations on Insta, a set of travel photos (not hers) pinned on Pinterest, a seemingly random selection of liked tweets, and finally, the results of one of those stupid Hogwarts sorting quizzes. She's Slytherin, she insists to the imaginary Nick she talks to sometimes, no matter what the quiz results say. They're directions—place, time, relative confidence in the security of the conversation.

Nick is late, of course, and she suppresses her worry by flirting with the students walking by in her half-decent French and chewing on the drawstrings of Nick's hoodie. She shouldn't have washed it. It doesn't smell like him at all now.

"The Astronomy Tower?" she says, giving him a raised eyebrow when he finally strolls up to stand beside her. 

"It's the Sorbonne," he replies with his stupid smile. "Don't give me that look. It's _Paris_." 

She missed him _so much_. It was an ache in her chest all the weeks they were apart, and now she feels like she can finally breathe again. 

He reaches out, takes the chewed-up end of his hoodie drawstring and twirls it between his fingers. "I knew I didn't lose this in Edinburgh."

"You should keep better track of your stuff." She doesn't mention that she's had it since Kalamazoo.

"Yeah," he says, dropping the drawstring and cupping her cheek, his gaze intent. "Some things are too important to lose."

She can't help but smile at that, even if she wanted to be annoyed, which she doesn't. "I'll help you keep track." She sounds breathless, and her lips are tingling, as if they remember his kiss.

He leans in close. "Good plan. I'll hold you to it." Then he tips her face up and kisses her again. 

It's different, this time, wetter when he slides his tongue into her mouth, and harder, but slower, lingering, like he could kiss her all day if he wanted to. She wants him to.

She curls her fingers in the soft material of his shirt and kisses back with everything she's got, pressing herself against him and imprinting the whole experience in her memory—his taste and smell and the warm solidity of his body, the rough brush of his stubble against her skin, the span of his hand across her back, the way she can't get enough air but doesn't want to stop kissing him long enough to breathe. The look of wonder on his face when he pulls back.

"See that you do," she says, breathless and giddy. 

Nick laughs, and kisses her again, laughing.

They don't talk much for the next little while, but the sound of a wolf whistle brings her back to herself. This is too public, and they are still in danger.

"I got a hotel room," he says, as if he knows what she's thinking. "A nice one. No youth hostels for us this time around."

It's on the tip of her tongue to ask where he got the money, but she decides she doesn't need to know. There'll be time for catching up, and kissing (so much more kissing, if she has anything to say about it), later.

"We're not too far from Marseilles," she says, instead.

He sobers immediately. "Is it time?"

"No. I don't know. But it couldn't hurt to poke around a little. Could it?"

"You're the brains," he says, teasing back in his voice for a moment before he gets serious again. "And she's your mother. It's your call."

"Okay." She curls her hand around his, lets him lead her to this nice hotel he's picked out. "We don't have to go right away. We could come up with a decent plan this time." She shoots him a wicked grin. "And maybe if you're lucky, I'll give you back your hoodie."

"Nah," he says, grinning back. "I like the way it looks on you."

end


End file.
